Blogcritics The critical lens on today's culture & entertainment
Young people abandoned. Or stranded. Left to fend for themselves without adult guidance in an unwelcoming, even hostile world. This is one of our oldest and strongest tropes, enacted generation after generation in popular culture. Whether stranded or crash-landed (Lord of the Flies, Yellowjackets) or thrust into primitive peril intentionally (The Hunger Games), being lost and on our own fighting for survival is a primal fear, particularly vivid when we’re young.
In the riveting Blood Orange from Et Alia Theater, Abigail Duclos raises this ur-theme in the psychological rather than the physical realm. Two teenage girls have been abandoned by parents, in different ways. In response they create their own powers-that-be that they can beseech for restoration of their lost caretaking and security. Flailing, they retreat into fantasy, infancy, hostility, or a hard shell.
Friends and Fantasies
But amid or above it all, they find bonding. At its core, Blood Orange is about friendship. And so, while it’s viscerally a horror yarn, and dramatically a study of character (two in particular), at its core lies a story of friendship.
Faye’s father’s recent death has left the 16-year-old in a state of panicky limbo. Her beloved stepmother has retreated to her room in a depression deepened by addiction to painkillers for a bad back. Faye, played by Maria Müller in the performance I saw (there is a partially rotating cast), and on stage for pretty much the whole 90 minutes, is doing for herself with tomato soup and TV dinners while trying to care for mom. Faye reveals to her shy friend Eden a new secret: a deity she has conjured out of a dead animal preserved in a paper bag in the fridge.
The unpopular Eden is lost in a different way. She lives with a psychologically abusive father who has gone as far as to rip the stuffing out of her childhood teddy bear trying to make her grow up. Faye and Eden’s private cult deepens, in spite of the objections of the hypersexual, devil-may-care Georgia, a foil of a friend who isn’t living with trauma. The story winds toward a seemingly inevitable yet still jolting end, with a grisly shock and a devastating reveal.
Along the way the girls act out their adolescent pain, and in Faye’s case desperation, through song, ritual movement and dance (choreography by associate director Amelia Rose Estrada), stylized violence and self-harm, mean-girl clicquishness, and adolescent mysticism.
Ana Moioli endows Eden with convincing out-group awkwardness, kind of in the style of a young Juliette Lewis. Giorgia Valenti’s (in the performance I saw) Georgia bounces with the breezy, overcooked confidence of the pretty, popular girl – though we do sense that her bravado is an overcompensation for some unacknowledged insecurity. Doreen Oliver is heart-wrenching in her single scene as Mariah, Faye’s mother. And as Faye, the heartbeat of the production, Müller is a dynamo, a burning sun of religious fantasy and desperate hope.
Hope for the Hopeless?
Director Vernice Miller stages the action with a meticulous simplicity that well suits this story of interiority. Most of it takes place in Faye’s house, evoked by a legless couch, some pillows and blankets, a small fridge and little else. Lighting and sound cues (by Hayley Garcia Parnell and Laura Pereira respectively) lend the ritual scenes an effective spookiness.
Can there be any real saving for Faye? Either way, acid performances by an excellent cast vivify the saving grace of the girls’ emotional nightmare: the power of friendships, especially those enduring ones forged in the fires of adolescence. Bare facts – like the actual fates we might posit for the characters – be damned.
Et Alia Theater’s slogan is “Celebrating the Voices and Stories of International Women,” and women comprise the entire creative team for this play, in which the only men are unseen presences. Meanwhile, playwright Abigail Duclos’ “stories laugh, dance, cry, and draw blood,” according to her own website, and in this harrowing story she unveils a powerful creative voice that realizes those ambitions.
Blood Orange runs through Sept. 27, 2025 at the Jeffrey & Paula Gural Theatre of A.R.T./New York. It’s appropriate for ages 14 and up, but deals with topics (violence, self-harm, parental death) to which some people may be sensitive. Tickets are available online.
